Full of falafel

I ought to write a book entitled 'Red Kidney Beans - Your Lifelong Friends.'

The really rich chocolate cake I serve to my gluten-free mates is yummy. It has a smashing chocolate ganache and a healthy (sugar-free) cream cheese filling.

Fudgey chocolate brownies, also made with a red kidney bean base, are a delight. And in both cases I use truvia sweetener rather than sugar. Very healthy.

I have taken to eating falafel in a big way since experiencing vegan and Levantine cuisines. Our local Lebanese does a full-of-flavour falafel lunch and our closest, newest vegan restaurant bathes their falafels in a pomegranate salad. Highly recommended.

While Richard has been between surgeries ( one with general anaesthetic, another local) I've been 'In and Out of the Kitchen' a la Damien Trench as portrayed by comedian Miles Jupp on radio 4. This week's episode of 'In and Out...' on iplayer/ BBC Sounds sees Jupp, as culinary expert Trench, giving up his command of the kitchen so his partner can cook. A bit like in our house. Richard is usually the cookist. But now the kitchen is, temporarily, my domain.

I'm cooking shop-bought falafels for our evening meal tonight but have cobbled together a recipe for homemade ones. It’s awfully easy! And I'll be making more at the weekend, with my friends the red kidney beans.

Ingredients

For 15 falafel balls

400 g can of red kidney beans, drained and rinsed

1/2 chopped onion

#4 tbsp Farchioni Il Casolere cold-pressed olive oil

1 glove garlic ( or the equivalent amount in chopped leeks or chives)

3 tbsp gluten-free flour eg buckwheat or oat flour*

1 tsp black sesame seeds ( or flax seeds)

(2 tbsp crushed cashew nuts - optional)

2 tsp ground cumin or paprika

1/2 tsp chilli powder or chilli flakes

1 tsp ground black pepper 

1 further tsp olive oil

(Add salt to taste if desired)

* oat flour is made in the food processor by grinding down porridge oats until they resemble the consistency of flour

Method

1 Using only 1 tsp oil and 1 tbsp flour pulse all the ingredients in the food processor. Leave the rest of the oil and flour for the moment.

2 When mixed transfer to a bowl, fold in the rest of the flour and put the whole in the fridge for half an hour to make a firmer 'dough'. Have something in a glass and put your feet up! 

3 After half an hour heat the 4 tbsp oil in a frying pan. Meanwhile remove the 'dough' from the fridge and break it up then roll it into roughly one inch-wide balls. If you prefer you can omit the extra #olive oil and the frying stage: you can bake the falafels instead. They do come out less crispy but bear in mind baked falafels contain fewer calories. If you stick to the frying method each ball should be around 95 calories and take approximately six minutes per side to cook. They are ready when brown on each side. If you bake them in a pre-heated oven put them on a baking tray at 375 deg F,190 deg C, 170 fan, flipping them over half way through, for 25 minutes.

Serve with a flat bread, sweet freshly picked  tomatoes or Fage Greek yogurt. It's a quick,easy and nutritious meal. And the red kidney bean, a lifelong friend, is a superb base. You can add a little cooked, mashed beetroot if you like added colour and flavour. If you have any falafel balls left over they will keep in the fridge, covered, for up to four days. 

I hope you enjoy my cobbled-together recipe. There are many versions in cookery books and online but we love this one with red kidney beans! 

Sent from my ipad

Two Soups?

Not content, last week, with resorting to stilton and broccoli soup, nor pea and ham, for lunch, I found I needed another recipe. Fresh kale was sitting in fridge number one, as were larger than average carrots. What to do?

Kale soup, perhaps? Now there's an idea.

Not only does the recipe leave us with plenty of kale for another day and in another way but it also uses up many of our many carrots. Kale is vitamin rich: it contains vitamins K, A, C, B6, B1, B2, B3, D and can also provide us with manganese, calcium, magnesium, sodium, iron, phosphorus and potassium. Eating foods containing magnesium may help reduce the risk of type 2 diabetes and heart disease. Kale is known as one of the most nutritious foods in existence.

It also contains antioxidants that help reverse damage by free radicals. These devils are known to drive aging and cancer. Antioxidants found in kale also lower blood pressure, and are anti-inflammatory, anti-viral and anti-depressant. When cooked it wilts like spinach but it contains 4 1/2 times as much vitamin C as spinach. What’s more a cup of kale has more vitamin C than a whole orange! Kale contains bile acid sequestrants too. They bind bile acids in the digestive system which reduces the total amount of cholesterol in the body. A juice made from this super superfood, when drunk daily over 12 weeks, increases good HDL cholesterol and lowers LDL cholesterol.

Macular degeneration can be supported by eating orange foods eg apricots, carrots, orange peppers but also kale. These foods contain lutein which reduces the risk of macular degeneration development. And eating kale is much better for your digestive system than taking lutein-containing supplements. It can be eaten as a salad or made into kale crisps:simply drizzle olive oil over kale leaves, add salt and bake in the oven until dry.

However, today, I am sharing with you my kale soup recipe, having been very pleased with the taste. The sweetness is from the carrots and it certainly doesn't feel like you are being forced to eat boiled cabbage, even though kale is a brassica!

Ingredients
2 tbsp cold-pressed extra virgin olive oil
1 large onion - finely chopped
4 medium carrots - roughly chopped
200 g curly kale - chopped
2 garlic cloves - crushed
700 ml chicken stock or vegetable stock

( some recipes suggest adding pepper for flavour and milk for extra creaminess)

The method is a straightforward soup-making one:

Heat the oil in a large pan over a medium heat, sweat the vegetables, minus the kale, for 10 minutes to soften the onion. Introduce the kale and sweat for 5 minutes whereby it should have wilted. Add the stock, bring to the boil, then simmer for 20  minutes. I cool the soup if I'm not wanting to serve it immediately and finish off by blending it for 30 seconds in the food processor until it is smooth.

I don't find the soup needs added creaminess and I leave out the milk. If you have chives or leeks growing in the garden they are an excellent substitute for garlic. The garlic taste isn't, however, too strong. And the colour of the soup is a golden yellow with green speckles. Magnificent!

Eating or drinking kale on a daily basis is one of the simplest ways you can ensure your body is in a good position to fight free radicals and it's a good support for your whole system.

But I'm told kale is a bugger to grow in your back garden, requiring time, manure and a lot of 'fiddling' ... unlike spinach which is a doddle!

Brownies - but not the Girl Guides

To get some semblance of order into our household, following Richard’s various trips to out-of-hours GPs, specialist nurses and our local surgery I’ve been interested in brownies:
(No, not the younger versions of the Girl Guide movement, but chocolate brownies, those appetising snacks which can be dressed up or down.)

Brownies are an interesting phenomenon. They are not quite cake, not quite chocolate, not quite a biscuit but ever so slightly great as a simple pudding. In my bid to stay healthy and get thin(ner) this September I’m casting around for low sugar, low carb recipes. And, having signed up for Cancer Research UK’s Sweatember event I exercise daily, have my sponsors and will thereby endeavour to stay fit. 

My breakfast is still either steel-cut, whole-grain porridge with berries - a low GI start to the day, or eggs. Both morning choices are filling. Healthy soups for lunch are about right for September onwards, now that temperatures are dropping. Lentil falafel - a speciality of vegan restaurants - are a great alternative for lunch if I’m eating out. 

Over the summer I haven’t had a particularly sweet tooth. Perhaps because it was so warm glasses of water and plenty of fruit or good, thick Greek yogurt were satisfying enough. But as we head into autumn (the sun is lower in the sky, it’s dark by 8:15pm and counting, vegetation growth is slowing down, plants are raggedy and need trimming or removing) I have a greater need for sweetness.

I love baking my red kidney bean chocolate cake but last week I wanted something I could bake and eat without having to make a ganache or a filling. And I happened upon a red kidney bean brownie recipe. 

I had no idea whether the end result would be brittle, hard, fudge-like or cakey. I just followed the recipe, with minor amendments and sought further advice at the end stage. The tooth pick to test whether the mixture has baked properly should not come out clean: be warned!! I go into more details in point 6 below.

Ingredients

• 11/2 cans of red kidney beans - drained and rinsed
• 1/4 cup creamy butter 
• 2 tablespoons Mernier cocoa powder
• 1/2 cup quick oats
• 2 Tablespoons plus 1 teaspoon (brown) Truvia sweetener (this is the Truvia equivalent of 1/3 cup of brown sugar) 
• 3/4 tabspoon Truvia sweetener (equivalent of white sugar)
• 1/4 cup cold-pressed virgin olive oil 
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
• 1 teaspoon gluten-free baking powder
• 1/2 cup grated Belgian Cachet chocolate (56% cocoa) - their cherry and almonds variety is especially marvellous

In order to make this sweet sugar-free it’s important to be gluten-free too. If wheat-based flours are used the carbohydrates reduce down to sugar. Red kidney beans are a much better alternative.

The only major decision I pondered over in my prep was the depth of the baking tin. I read that a shallow, swiss roll type tin would yield a thin, rather hard brownie. Anything too deep like the average cake pan would produce a cakey, slightly undercooked brownie. I chose a *shallow, rectangular, pyrex dish which I lined with greaseproof paper. Another time I may use a half-size swiss roll tin and aim not to spread the mixture too thinly.

Instructions

1. Preheat oven to 350 deg f, 150 c fan. 
2. Combine all ingredients except the grated chocolate in a food processor. Pulse for 30 seconds until smooth and creamy. Remove the mixture to another bowl. 
3. Break the chocolate into smaller pieces and pulse in the food processor. The noise is terrific at first, but after 20-30 seconds the chocolate should have broken down. Stir the pulsed chocolate into the mixture or add the mixture to the chocolate in the food processor and do a final pulse so that the chocolate pieces are evenly distributed.
4. Line a rectangular glass pyrex dish* or smaller swiss roll tin* and pour the brownie mixture in it. Take a spatula to smooth out the top.
5. Bake the brownies for 20-22minutes until the top has a shiny, papery crust and the sides are just beginning to come away from the tin or dish. Take out of the oven.
6. When a tooth pick comes out slightly gooey and crumbly it’s done. If it’s clean it’s overcooked but if it’s runny and liquid brown it’s undercooked. 
7. Cool for two hours and then slice and serve.If it is properly cooked it should slice into squares without crumbling or breaking up.

The brownies I make using this mixture are more fudge-like than cake. The pieces are rich and good enough as a snack with a coffee or a cuppa. However it’s rather lovely to warm through the brownie shapes and serve with caramel or toffee ice cream, vanilla ice cream or Fage Total Greek yogurt ( the 5% Fage yogurt is thick, rich and creamy.

Gorgeous. 

Your brownies won’t hang around in a tin for long! 

Boris and Iain Duncan Smith

Richard has had, for them, minor surgery but, for him, a very disruptive summer. We have a flower-filled suntrap of a patio and have enjoyed sitting there in the intense heat since June. But the glorious sunshine has been marred by hospital appointments, waiting for results, various procedures ( Richard called these invasions Boris and Iain Duncan-Smith), side effects, further diagnoses, calls to 111 and numerous visits to our GP and out-of-hours... Thanks to the NHS someone has always been available to see and reassure him.

The overriding effect of his having a mild hernia, and other non life-threatening conditions, is his feeling of nausea in the mornings. He assures me he’s not pregnant. Of course he has had lots of new medication...And other parts of his anatomy are working overtime meaning he’s suffering from disrupted sleep. Going to the loo in the wee hours ( geddit?) is rather a frequent occurrence for him...

So who is doing the cooking in our household? Yep, it’s not the cat, that leaves only me.

Yesterday, having enjoyed a bowl at a Tewkesbury pub, sampled on one of Richard’s better days in August, I tried my hand at stilton and broccoli soup. Easy peasy and, for me, as I’m a convert to low carb meals, cheese is good... For years I avoided strong, blue cheeses. I found them a harsh taste but together with broccoli the mix is good and mild. And it’ll be an alternative to pea and ham soup now the sun is lower in the sky and it’s dark not long after 8 pm. Yes it’s 2 1/2 months since Longest Day. Where have we been all this time? In hospital that’s where.

I altered the found recipe slightly to incorporate cold-pressed olive oil ( rather than rapeseed) and left out the celery.

Broccoli and stilton soup

140g stilton,crumbled

2 tbsp olive oil

1 onion, finely chopped

1 leek, sliced

1 medium potato, diced

1 knob butter

1litre chicken or vegetable stock

1 head broccoli, roughly chopped

As I made a boo-boo and we have bags of red onions from our supermarket home delivery, I thought I’d ordered three loose medium onions, but clearly not, we’ve been enjoying onion soup. Lots of it. And for the above recipe I have leeks growing in the garden, potatoes still to lift and broccoli from our farm shop. I only have to buy the stilton from our deli. And I need a walk. Last week I succumbed to four days of lying flat to support my neck. While Richard’s been incapacitated I’ve done more in the garden, pulling at hefty brambles and stubborn bindweed, and caused myself severe neck pain. Needless to say we have a gardener coming in next week.

Back to the broccoli and stilton concoction: The method is straightforward, a standard soup-making procedure. I find I like a little less liquid as I enjoy a thick soup, but each to his own:

1. Heat 2 tbsp olive oil in a large saucepanand then add the finely chopped onion. Cook on a medium heat until soft.
2. Add 1 sliced leek, 1 diced medium potato and a knob of butter. Stir until melted, then cover. Allow to sweat for 5 minutes and remove the lid.
3. Pour in 1litre ( or less) of chicken stock and add the chopped, chunky stalk from the head of broccoli. Cook for 10-15 minutes until all the vegetables are soft.
4. Add the rest of the chopped broccoli and cook for a further 5 minutes.
5. Allow to cool a little and pour the whole in to a food processor and blitz until thick and smooth.
6. Stir in the crumbled cheese, allowing a few lumps on the top as garnish. Season with black pepper and serve hot. 

You can adjust the amount of stilton downwards if you find it a very strong taste but in a soup it’s beautifully absorbed, rich and creamy. Other blue cheeses are available.

Yummy, healthy and low carb. Hoorah for autumn!

Bleak House

Reading the news headlines today makes it seem like we are living through very bleak times indeed. Of course reporters have to get a strap line and papers or online subscriptions have to sell and make money but let’s get some balance:

If it’s not Brexit it’s Johnson and the suspension of parliament. If it’s not the Amazon forest burning it’s Australia’s coral reef bleaching and dying. If it’s not delays or cancellations at airports it’s migrants taking dangerous journeys. If it’s not Trump it’s Tusk.

If it’s not clashes in Hong Kong it’s protests against Boris-Bojo-Johnson, our Prime Minister, in London. And women’s programmes, books and discussions have leapt on menopause as the latest ‘last taboo’ to investigate.

Too miserable.

On a more bizarre note I could mention recent newsworthy difficulties with the Royal Family, hurricanes in the USA, a story about a burning man or a girl stating her gangster father made her have a nose job. Or I could go to the other extreme and read about the equally disturbing fact that ‘The Great British Bake Off’ with its nauseating neon icing sugar and hullabaloo makes headline news. And if it’s not Bake Off it’s Strictly. Again, let’s get some balance.

What are the thought police doing to us? Trying to mould us into frightened kittens by creating an armageddon where our only option is to retreat into bake caking or over- sexed dance competitions?

On a positive note, or is it? the government is giving schools and FE a boost. BBC News reports:

‘Next year schools will receive a £2.6bn uplift, rising to £4.8bn the following year - with schools spending £7.1bn more than at present by 2022-23.’

and

‘The chancellor is to announce £400m of additional funding for further education in England, as part of his spending review next week.’

Despite Johnson’s premiership convulsing us with its brazen optimism and stubbornness - rather in the manner of a fellow American leader - yes Johnson was born in New York - Professor Curtice says the Tories have gained an extra few per cent in the share of the national vote since Johnson became PM. I can only think that we’re heading for an election and Johnson and the Tories want to remove their iron man exteriors and promote themselves as fluffy, caring ‘end of austerity’ governors of this country. And thereby get elected.

Since 2010 few teachers or teaching assistants have had a meaningful pay rise, the supertax threshold was lowered so deputy heads and other senior staff would see less money in their bank account than expected despite the huge extra responsibilities such roles demand of them. There has been less money for real items such as classroom maintenance, books and pens. And the most vulnerable children have had a squeezed social services trying to meet their needs with a skeleton staff. Meanwhile funds have supported the grades A-C GCSE classes (or grade 7 in this year’s edu-speak) causing special needs children to receive proportionately less.

So hip, hip, hooray for a Tory government who is kind enough to yield £2.6 bn to schools in the next year. 

But - and forgive me for having flights of fancy - what if the Tories aren’t re-elected? Schools would surely not be left with continuing financial problems under a Labour-LibDem alliance? Nothing like pushing a socialist manifesto to outwit Labour. Get in first. Very clever Mr Cummings.

Johnson pledged fantastic sums to the NHS if we left the EU. That was found to be another over-hyped strap line. As I type I don’t know who or what to believe. Certainly those in the headlines are good at courting publicity. But are they - and the reporters who write about them - the people we should be listening to? Since I don’t trust today’s headlines for their bleakness, life isn’t THAT black, I’ll ignore miserable, edgy breaking news and quote WB Yeats:

‘The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.’

WB Yeats (The Second Coming, 1919)

Oh for a quiet discussion with informed, thinking men and women instead of listening to ranting and hectoring from power-hungry exhibitionists.

Austerity - it always has been austere for some.

My father was a grammar school Head and my mother worked with children with severe special needs. Hence me. After well-paid holiday jobs ( with time-and-a-half, double-time and sleep-over allowances ) in a small children’s home, I became a special needs teacher then a manager - a SENCO - in a large comprehensive school. A true amalgam of the Head and the special needs assistant.

When I was studying ( ahem) for my first degree, on a full grant, enjoying three years of purpose-built student accommodation, all fees paid, I took to holiday work. So I could go on holiday, not to pay off a loan. Unlike mates of mine who worked in shops, diy stores, the first ‘Comet’ selling electrical goods or as postmen and women, I chose another route. I worked almost all of my summer holidays in a children’s home. For children in care. The ones not at home with their mums. Or dads. Or grans.

Before my first day there I’d imagined a big family atmosphere with children being read to in a happy group. Cuddles. Treats. It was the great heat wave of 1976, during the long summer holidays when an exotic ‘bottle brush’ flowered in our garden for the first time. And tender conservatory plants thrived outside.

But for those in care: their lives were as parched as the yellow straw which ate up the lawn.

Individually the children, wiry, thin-legged specks, liked to talk to me and ask questions. ( An attempt at ‘What’s it like in the real world?’ perhaps.) On first acquaintance one girl was ever so slightly impertinent, pushing boundaries but, having sussed me out, the cheek was never repeated. The rest: a brother and sister, a slightly handicapped junior school-aged girl, Leroy, and Maura - who looked like Leroy - and another quieter lad, used to ask me, very politely, if they could have a biscuit or a piece of fruit. Or why was it so hot? Occasionally the group of seven children - it was a very small home for children in care - would go to the park. Once I went with them. They ran around, were well-behaved and were all ready by the big clock face as it struck 8pm. Back ‘home’ for a drink and bedtime.

Ready in pyjamas there was no sitting in a circle to be read to. There were rules. Time for brushing teeth and dirty clothes in baskets. Time for lights-out.

Time for ‘hands’ before meal-times. Time for grace and giving thanks. Time for breakfast. Time for clearing the table. Time for washing up. Time for making a bed or stripping a sheet. Time for watching TV or playing in the garden (with what?). But no time for being read to. For me that long, hot summer of ‘76 was spent watching dislocated, unstimulated children getting used to being bored.

Not many fights or arguments broke out. But there was nothing to do. Menus had to be recorded. Incidents had to be written up. A diary of sorts showed ‘not much happened’, really. Day after long, long day.

Leroy, boney and full of smiles, came and sat with me in the holy of holies - the office - and I began to teach him to read. His concentration was reasonable but short-lived. There was always a knock at the door. And whispering.

‘What’s Leroy doing in there with aunty Nina?’

The following summer, just before the end of their school term, I turned up again. I don’t remember a great embrace. No hostility either. Just dead eyes. I went to the children’s school sports day. My kids were not competing. Standing under a blazing afternoon sun I was asked by a Head of Year who I was. Her response was:

‘Well you’re dealing with the bottom of the barrel. The ones who’ll never amount to anything.’ 

Not... 

‘ And how are you finding the work?’ 

or

‘They’ll be pleased you’ve come to see them at their sports day’. 

No. I was being told society had already labelled the children in care, in my care. They had been written off. I was dumbstruck. While the Head of Year spoke the sun wasn’t the only thing in my eyes.

Devastated and angry I decided to do something about it. Teach children in care. Teach special needs. Teach the ones who would amount to nothing. The unwanted. 

And my PGCE teaching course began. Just at the time of the Warnock Report.

The Warnock Report (1978)

Special Educational Needs

Report of the Committee of Enquiry into the Education of Handicapped Children and Young People.

The report referred to pupils in special schools who should be included in mainstream education. But their reality was they were only fit to be taught in bottom sets. Unless I did something about it. Hoorah. I did! I managed a very successful teaching and support team for twenty years; small group work, appropriate provision, specialist programs.

But, in my final year of teaching, when Osborne’s austerity budget took hold, the great unwashed were dumped on me by busier, more important teachers. Along with their ‘unteachables’ I was given an unsuitable curriculum and an insufficiency of desks and pens. While the unwanted and I rubbed along in my too-small classroom the Heads of English and Maths made no provision for them; it was I who was teaching them after all. And with ‘the rabble’ out of their hair they could concentrate on getting grades A-C for their much better sets. That was 2010.

What had changed since 1976? What was different from Warnock and her recommendations that 20% of school-aged pupils might, at some time, have special needs which required education that was ‘additional to or different from’ usual classroom arrangements?

Nothing.

In 2010 children who weren’t high flyers were pushed aside. And since Cameron and Osborne sat on the front benches in the House of Commons children in need have had fewer social workers, school budgets have been squeezed and the world has become an uncharitable place for those ‘who’ll never amount to anything.’

Money is far more important than ethos, education acts or provision, it seems. And last night it was announced that the current Tory government is going to do something about school behaviour. Ten years after the austerity budget took hold. Forty years since the integration of children with special needs into mainstream became law. Integrated into what? 

Integrated into badly behaved bottom sets who will not ‘amount to anything’.

Is it any wonder children in care have the lowest academic achievements across England’s schools? With or without learning difficulties to be living in care surely counts as a special need? Don't they require more attention, not less? The need is there. But not the provision. But our new Tory government knows all about how to tackle behaviour. Finally there is money for school exclusions. Why not money to provide for children whose lives have been disrupted or who have other, additional needs? Why not more for provision at nursery age? Why not more for extra reading groups at junior school? Why do I get the feeling that certain groups of students are still being written off? 

What’s wrong with a group of children being read to? And proper provision? Help where it’s needed?...
Money...
That's what. For too long it's been an austere world for some. It's so much cheaper to label them and write them off.

Still. 

Bedsit or studio flat?

The writer Katharine Whitehorn, late of ‘The Observer’ inter alia, wrote a classic, ‘Cooking in a Bedsitter.’ It certainly doesn’t sound classic to modern ears, and now it might be entitled ‘Cooking in a Studio Flat’, but it saved the culinary lives of girls living away from home for the first time, for their first foray into the world of paid employment. The other difference today would likely be not having the impracticality of sharing a bathroom at the other end of a  badly lit landing. It’s very difficult to strain peas, cooked on a single gas ring in the hearth, when another tenant is having a bath or washing his socks in the communal washbasin.

In the 1960s, when I was a child and consequently exempt from the cares, and joys, of bedsit land, I would see images of women in magazines doing something with a single light bulb, reaching up to the ceiling on a rickety chair in order to ‘plug’ an iron into the light fitting. I never did understand the electrical connections required but the activity looked dangerous on many counts. Similarly a picture of a glass bottle of milk, paper stuffed in the neck to stop birds dipping their beaks in the ‘top of the milk’, showed it perched on a window ledge as there was no fridge in the room, nay in the building. Knickers would be hung on a piece of string over a communal bath and washing up would be in a bucket. 

This is the problem when water is not on tap in your own room and there is nowhere to dry your washing or do your own dishes.

But odder than all of these Heath Robinson approaches to living in shared accommodation was the gas ring attached to the gas fire. It sat in the grate. Okay if you wanted to simply boil a kettle, filled from the washbasin in the ever-busy shared bathroom, but hopeless for cooking anything more exciting or nutritious than baked beans. Hence the need for Katharine Whitehorn’s timely publication.

She describes the difficulties of keeping butter from turning rancid in the days before mini fridges were commonplace. Her fail-safe recipes for casserole cooking meant a proper meal could be created in a room with no work surface, no food cupboard and a gas ring over which one crouched as if camping in a one-man tent in a wet field with a small, portable single gas canister. Cooking at floor level.

Almost sixty years later studio flats do not present the same problems. A sink unit, work surface, kitchen cupboards and cooker are positioned on one wall of the hip shared living, eating, sleeping space. No-one has to grab a torch at 2 a.m. to find their way along a dark hallway to the only available, shared W.C. Nowadays an ensuite shower room provides the privacy and convenience today’s tenants require.( Do I sound like an estate agent?). And washer-driers remove the need to hang wet hand-washed bras and knickers over a communal bath. They probably took days to dry as oftentimes said bathrooms wouldn’t be centrally heated. Not only was it a cold experience taking a bath in such primitive conditions, wet washing, hand-rung at best, had very little chance of drying in a permanently unheated room. The smell of damp must have been all-pervading. 

Another method for drying washing was to hang clothes on a wooden airer in front of a single gas fire. The air would be full of steam. Living in a bedsit was, I guess, like living in a sauna.

We will be in Devon at the weekend for a big party in the country. Richard and I thought about booking an Airbnb room, with its own ensuite and attached mini kitchen. There on offer was a mini fridge, a microwave oven, toaster and plug-in induction hob, all resting on a practical wipe-down work surface. A fan operated in this Airbnb kitchen, presumably to ensure there would be no lingering cooking smells. There was a slimline dishwasher and a washer drier too. All squeezed into a small space with a range of cooking utensils, pots and pans in kitchen cupboards.

With all this on offer the bad old days of communal living are dead, it seems. We can cook, wash up, have our day wear and swimming gear washed and drying within minutes of being soiled. All done in the ensuite kitchen. A shower can be taken in perfect privacy in the ensuite wet room without our having to queue up or scurry in for a rapid bathe in the freezing cold, shared, temporarily vacant bathroom. All the time hoping there is still enough hot water to service the washing needs of all the residents.

Our long weekend in Devon will be bliss. Except we’ll be eating out and there will be no time for domestic chores such as washing out our socks. The standard ensuite shower room will be very welcome but I don’t think we’ll need the room for anything more than simply sleeping. We won’t need to cook or do our laundry. We could have booked a room with a shared bath and kitchen...

Which brings me back to Katharine Whitehorn. Her 1960s guide for the homesick has been re-scripted by Sue Teddern and her comic series was first aired on radio 4 in 2016. It’s a great little comedy. Funnier than living it back then, that’s for sure.

Aren’t we lucky?